Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?

If a lover is wretched who invokes kisses of which he knows not the flavor, a thousand times more wretched is he who has had a taste of the flavor and then had it denied him.

At times the mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it.

What about books? Well, precisely because you have denied it in every other field, you believe you may still grant yourself legitimately this youthful pleasure of expectation in a carefully circumscribed area like the field of books, where you can be lucky or unlucky, but the risk of disappointment isn't serious.

Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.

In abortion, the person who is massacred, physically and morally, is the woman.

I had fallen in love. What I mean is: I had begun to recognize, to isolate the signs of one of those from the others, in fact I waited for these signs I had begun to recognize, I sought them, responded to those signs I awaited with other signs I made myself, or rather it was I who aroused them, these signs from her, which I answered with other signs of my own . . .